Chapter 7 The Phoenix
Chapter seven
The Phoenix
After group therapy was over, the nurses didn’t continue with our schedule for the rest of the day. Whatever issues Brandon was causing was taking most of them away from their duties, including my first individual therapy session. That gave the rest of us free use of the lounge until dinner time.
Thankfully, she answered on the second ring, her voice more formal than it would have been if she had known it was me calling her.
“Hello?”
“Hey Michelle, it’s me.”
“About time they let you call me, I’ve been in the dark about what’s going on!
How are you, Rae?” I had to bite my lip for a second, the pain keeping the tears from falling at how heavy my heart felt from missing her.
Having grown up with only each other to rely on, we were bonded more closely than a pair of conjoined twins.
She was my rock, my one consistent person in a world that was changing faster than the tides.
“How's Riley?” Forever my top priority.
“He’s fine, Rae, that asshole had him shut in a room when the EMTs arrived, but I’ve been staying at your house with him since then.
How are you? The doctors told me you tried to kill yourself, and I wasn’t allowed at the hospital until after your intake was complete.
” She was rambling, a trait she had only when her anxiety was high.
“They said visitors might cause you to have another episode and wanted to get you settled in.”
“It’s complete now. I didn’t try to kill myself, Micky, I swear I didn’t.”
“I know you didn’t, I know, what the fuck happened?”
I twisted the small cord around my fingers, creating a noose around each one and hanging them one at a time.
Pulling the cord until the tips of my fingers turned bright red and started to tingle.
The image made my throat throb with the memory of what had happened.
It wasn’t long and was probably kept short to prevent patients from wrapping it around their necks since it was easily accessible in a public hallway.
“Look,” I told her, “we have visiting hours tonight. Why don't you come here so I can talk to you in person? I was hoping you could bring me some clothes so I wouldn’t be stuck wearing scrubs the entire time.”
“Sure, I can do that. What time?”
“The nurse told me six, after our dinner time. Can you bring me a few books as well? All they have here are just mysteries and thrillers, and I can’t bring myself to read any of it.
” The last thing I needed was any more murder and suspense in my life.
I needed one of my comfort reads, no matter how dark they were.
“From which bookcase?”
“The one at the top of my landing, dark romance, please. Those are the ones I haven’t started yet, so just surprise me.”
“Okay, I can do that. Let me take Riley on a walk, and I’ll be there at six. I love you, Rae.”
“Love you, Mickey.”
Hanging up the phone, I felt a small sense of relief.
A minuscule part of me had feared that maybe she would believe what the doctors had told her.
She knew better than that, though. She knew deep down that anything I had done to cope with stress wasn’t about trying to kill myself.
Even with the trauma we endured growing up, we had promised to always be there for one another, and I wasn’t going to break that promise now.
The thoughts lingered in the back of my mind.
Selfish thoughts of ending my internal battle, being free from the burden of enduring the mental torment.
But my promise to my sister was greater; I would never go back on it.
I checked the clock on the wall, it was only four thirty in the afternoon, so I went back to the lounge to spend some time with Kendi and Andrew.
Thelma had left about an hour ago to take a nap before dinner, saying the medication they had put her on not only killed her appetite but made her drowsy as well.
Tyson had grabbed a book and gone back to his room while the rest of us had decided to try and pass the time by watching a movie.
Kendi voted nothing scary, Andrew didn’t seem to care much either way, so our options from the DVDs were some old Adam Sandler movies, a few rom coms, or Pirates of the Caribbean.
Cable was apparently something the clinic hadn’t invested in for the patients.
I put the disc into the DVD player and handed Kendi the remote.
As the opening credits started to roll and a ship appeared in the dense fog, I found it hard to focus on anything other than how to get out of this mess.
There was no getting out of the program early, not when you didn’t voluntarily check yourself in.
I would be forced to stay the entire duration of the program regardless of what had happened.
What I couldn’t figure out is where things went wrong.
I had sent Craig the breakup text after coming to terms not just with the cheating, but with how his behavior towards me wasn’t acceptable.
I had made sure not to place blame, including saying that he wasn’t happy either and that I wanted him to be happy.
Everything I had done in preparation to send that text had been thought over and analyzed at least a dozen times, to make sure I wouldn’t leave room for error.
Never in a million years had I thought things would transpire the way they had that night.
Our fights had escalated before, even to the point of becoming physical, but never on that level.
He’d always been able to maintain some form of self control so that he never seriously hurt me.
I’d suffered bruises occasionally, small ones that were easy enough to hide since with my scars, I wore long sleeves anyway, but most of the damage was emotional.
The nail in the coffin that ended our relationship was realizing I no longer knew who I was.
My entire existence had been changing into the person he wanted me to be.
I wasn’t growing into a better person, or even changing for the better.
Slowly, I found myself disappearing while he meticulously erased everything I had ever been.
Every ounce of confidence I had possessed had slowly eroded away during our relationship.
Nothing had happened quickly, not from my perspective.
His tactics were subtle, almost unnoticeable when I was in the moment facing them.
He wore the most remarkable mask, passing off as a caring person when he wanted to, hiding the rotten core beneath.
At one point, he had me convinced that I was the reason he lost his temper so frequently.
It had taken months of trying to distance myself from him to see that it wasn’t me.
It had never been me. I wasn’t in control of his inability to control his own temper.
He just wasn’t capable of accepting responsibility for his own behaviors.
“Johnny Depp isn’t just an actor, that man is an artist,” Kendi stated, bringing me out of my thoughts.
“I’ll have to agree with you on that. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie of his that I haven’t liked.”
“I haven’t been to the theater in ages,” She mused, slouching back on the couch and getting comfortable as Elizabeth Swann woke suddenly from her dream about the fateful day they rescued William Turner from the dark waters.
“I think the last movie I saw in the theater was La Llorona,” Craig had taken me to see it.
I had loved the universe that the movie was set in, but he hated horror movies, though.
He had fussed the entire ride back to my house about films being unoriginal nowadays and asked me to pay him back for the tickets since he didn’t enjoy it.
Funny, considering he told me since it was our anniversary, I could pick whatever movie I wanted for us to see.
Hindsight was always twenty-twenty when trying to pick out what would have been considered red flags in the circus of our relationship.
Kendi pulled back her beautifully long, thick braids and tied them together with a purple scrunchie she had pulled out of her pocket.
A comfortable silence settled between us.
She hadn’t forced me to try and talk. When our conversations started to drift into uncomfortable territory and I made it obvious I didn’t want to open up, she would change the subject to something a little easier to dive into.
Books were a big thing. I had found out over the past few hours that she was an avid reader just like me.
She even dabbled in dark romance, a topic I found difficult to discuss with most fellow readers because it wasn’t widely accepted.
We had spent the better part of two hours after lunch talking about books, our favorite authors, and things in the books that we wanted to try.
Kendi revealed to me that she was about my age, despite her small appearance, and had just turned twenty-seven before her parents convinced her to check herself into the clinic to get help with her anorexia.
She also shared my love of animals, though she didn’t have any of her own at home; her apartment complex didn’t allow pets.
I wished I had some pictures of Riley to show her.
I loved showing him off. He had been a box puppy dumped off at the local animal shelter.
I happened to be working the day they brought him in for his initial exam.
The vet I worked for did discounted services through the shelter to help them lower their adoption costs.
Falling in love instantly would be an understatement.
Riley was a pure German Shepherd from what we could tell, with no health issues, so the reason he was abandoned remained a mystery to us.
He was however, the perfect dog. To use the term Dr. Faris had come up with years ago, a soul dog.